Alts and horizontal expansion

I really like the idea of revitalising and revisiting old content in Azeroth.  As someone who started in BC, I missed a lot of the old content, and since I have been going back while trying to do loremaster and fulfill old reputation grinds, I have been really enjoying that content.  I am a little conflicted though.  I am interested to see more quests in the game and find out those story lines.  But the new expansion seems to be aimed at getting people to reroll as previously unavailable races or classes.  And then they doubtless just skip through all of the content and don’t see anything interesting.  I have still not done the new quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh on any toon.  In fact the only way I will see a whole range of new content is by going and visiting it on my main.
 
My current issue is just what class I will roll as my Worgen (assuming I stick with my alliance preference – I think that there is every chance I will roll a Goblin to see that part of the story as well, but don’t know whether I would pursue it).  The available classes are DK, Druid, Hunter, Mage, Priest, Rogue, Lock and Warrior.  If you remove those classes of which I already have high level alts, the list becomes Mage, Rogue, Lock, Hunter.  I could reroll my DK, but truth be told the DK class makes me feel like I am cheating on my warrior, with whom I already have a conflicted relationship.  So for now I am happy for my DK to remain my inscriptionist and hang out milling things for me at level 60.  So the pros and cons of the various options.
 
Mage – I have never been able to play this class with any sort of accomplishment.  I have had an assortment of gnome mages who I think look just fantastic, but the whole squishy thing bugs the hell out of me.  I didn’t even find my spriest this squishy (though she had the advantage of skipping over a bunch of levels).  Further con that werewolf in a dress just seems dumb.
 
Rogue – Ugh, even worse than mage.  My very very first character was actually a rogue, but I abandoned her fully twinked at 19 even though she had never been inside a BG.  She was twinked because I didn’t really want to abandon her so I kept spending money on her thinking that better gear might alleviate my suckage in playing her.  Worgen actually seem a great fit for a rogue, so if I get really stuck this is likely what I will roll, but ugh.
 
Hunter – Again, have rolled and rerolled hunters but just can’t enjoy them.  My current draenei is, at level 14, my highest hunter ever.  I suspect the real reason I am getting whatever enjoyment out of her at present is that she has a pet crab named “sushi”.  But how would it work with the pets having pets thing?  A maybe.
 
Lock – Again, have never really managed to level a lock with any great prospects.  This one, strangely enough seems like a real possibility because the *reason* why I have constantly been defeated by the lock is that I can’t get into the look of the races of them.  They don’t seem to match with female gnomes, and as all my toons are female this makes a gnome a real barrier – I can’t play a male gnome because sooner or later I feel like punting him – right around the time that he gets a ridiculous looking blueberry four times his size.  But I have never ever managed to warm to the humans (says a lot about me really).  And on the numerous occasions that I roll one, I get crazy dying over and over to the imp quest in northshire.  Horde has much better options for locks – I have created many orc and undead locks to admire.
 
Anyway, I think out of caution I will hold off playing my baby lock and mage, but will allow myself to play my hunter if I feel like it.  For now, a lock seems the most attractive, despite the whole “dog in a dress” ridiculousness of it.

For whom the cow trolls

So, off and on have been exploring my cow side and levelling a hordie tauren shaman. I always wanted a cow, but my main will always be alliance because that is where the guild is, and because of all of the time and energy I have invested in my ally toons. But I was still interested to see some of the horde content, and still interested from time to time in being alone, so I rolled a new toon on an oceanic server. I know someone with a guild there so if the sound of silence drives me crazy I have somewhere to go. But for the moment I am enjoying the silence.

Anyway, a little side effect of creating my hordie alt is that I am experiencing for the first time since beginning just what it is like to start with nothing – no gold, no bags, no resources etc. So this is a chance to enjoy some of the challenges of levelling and resourcing my toon from scratch and I thought I might record my process. The first thing I did when I got serious was to train dual gathering – in my case skinning/herbalism on my main horde toon. I don’t want to have to power level or mess about with my professions, so dual gathering is the go with the hope that I will make some gold through other abilities. I also trained fishing, cooking and first aid as secondary professions and will try to keep those levelled as much as possible as I go. But I had already run out of money to train these professions and I was still with only one bag.

I rolled a troll banker and got her to Ogrimmar without too much trouble at level 1, but she didn’t even have enough gold to post those auctions of peacebloom and leather scraps. So next thing I did was roll a DK to run through the starter area. I had heard that running through the first levels and just vendoring the gear was enough to get a fair amount of gold together relatively quickly, so I tried to do that. The blue DK gear doesn’t vendor for much, but the starter green set brings more money. Otherwise the money earnt from three levels of questing both as quest rewards and from vendor trash is more than my lowbie cow can manage.

By the end of that effort after vendoring all my gear and sending everything else to my banker, I had about 30g. This was enough to get my cow a fair float of petty cash with the rest to the banker to make into some real money. For now I have kept my naked DK because having all of the flight points may well come in handy. Started by splurging on some 8 slot bags for the cow which should be plenty for now and cost abour 50 silver each. Then I spent the weekend trying to build up my auctioneer scan data and periodically scanning for items listed for less than vendor. Setting the minimum threshold at a profit of 50s I still don’t quite have enough money yet to buy up all of the sub-vendor listed items on the AH at any given time, but it is a guaranteed return so I am patient with it. By the end of the weekend I was well over 100g with my lowbie cow still sitting at level 15 and doing nothing other than questing and gathering as she goes.

The downside of the sub-vendor bids is that it takes a little time – many of these are bids and therefore you have to wait to either be outbid or to win the item. I am finding a higher rate of success on this server at buying these items so that time is worth it. However, it means that any given time a fair bit of my float is hanging about on the AH waiting so I am limited on what I can do in the meantime. Once I have a comfortable buffer after the vendor item buy out, I will start to follow the same process with items listed for low prices which can be flipped. My experience is that this works most consistently with cloth, ore, herbs, ink, glyphs and twink items. We shall see how we go with this.

For the record

I am just going to assume that the three people who read this have read/watched all the info from Blizzcon about the new expansion. If you haven’t, why don’t you catch up mmmkay? It’s posted on like fifty billion blogs.

Chainstances

So got pulled into a guild chain instance run for new shiny emblems on the weekend.  The whole emblem of conquest thing is very exciting, and it gave me a chance to knock off a couple of achieves that I had been missing.  I was missing one boss in Pinnacle which I didn’t even realise until it dinged in the middle of the run.

The other one was the darned voidwalker in VH who I had never ever seen.  Every time I kept hoping that he would pop up and it always seems that we get doofy the ethereal instead (haaaate).  But knocked him off and got the void dance achieve for good measure.

Cataclysm

I really like the direction of the current rumours about the new expansion.   And I think it would be pretty good to have a world changing (even map changing) event to begin the expansion.  I know that people moaned about the scourge invasion and plague but I really enjoyed it.  And the cataclysm lends itself to some really cool world event type of ideas.

What about another theme on an armageddon like experience where tidal waves washed across the continent and we could all go and stand on the shore in Dustwallow a la Tea Leone (and who?  Donald Sutherland maybe?) in Sudden Impact.  I know it would be a lot of work, but you could have it all in a cut scene.

And Varian Wynn could be tragically washed out to sea!!   He could spend the next expansion held captive by Nagas whingeing about whether the Alliance cared enough to come save him, while Magni Bronzebeard takes his rightful place at the head of the Alliance, ably assisted by Velen (who would have a more prominent role but is hard to take seriously when he sits in his city of pink and never shows up anywhere).  Magni was right there in Stormpeaks – I spoke to him myself!!

Sorry, got a little off track there.  But it would be some cool ideas.  I love the idea of something really catastrophic, of an epic wrathgate type which dramatically changes the connections which people have with each other.  I know that they would never do so but wouldn’t it have been cool if Thrall had kicked the Forsaken out of the Horde at Wrathgate?  If their crime had been more against the Horde than aligned with the scourge, Thrall could have had a Tauren and kicked them out.  And Alliance could have totally adopted them in the whole Varian-esque moral relativity that we’ve got going on – the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of deal.

I have no sources

But I call bullshit on a couple of the rumours.

First, dwarf shamans and troll druids.  Lore aside, if they are adding extra classes to existing races, they will make them faction based.  We will either get new druid races for both horde and alliance or new horde paladin and alliance shaman races.  That being said, dwarves are a good match for shaman – we have seen iron dwarves behave shaman-like in Northrend chucking annoying lightning bolts at us.  Troll druids seem not so much, but I am totally not up on horde lore.  It would make sense for new classes to add to the new races (if they exist) but while worgen druids could work, goblins would struggle.

But it would be nice for players to have more than one race available for particular classes.  All power to Jong notwithstanding, there are probably a bunch of hordies who might be more inclined to play paladins if they didn’t have to be belves, and some people (my husband included) unaccountably can’t stand the space goat tail and waddle which remains a barrier to him levelling a shaman.

However, I do think that having a race that can’t heal is a mistake which they might rectify for the gnomes, and which would suggest that they would have to have a healing class for the goblins.  Although the priest idea seems weird for gnomes.  Maybe they should be shaman and drop itty bitty totems all over the place.

One thing is for sure, if they introduce new druid races I will be pretty annoyed after finally overcoming my hatred of night elves to level one to 60 with RAF.  Stupid little bouncebouncebounce.

Occulus schmoculus

So I finally got my occulus achieve over the weekend. With my limited play time I am used to doing things well after they are news to anyone.

However, occulus has such a bad rep that I could never get a full group of guildies who wanted to go. The emblems of conquest has everyone running heroics and a group I was in was stupid enough to ask for suggestions for what to run.

Strangely enough I really enjoyed it. It is tough and the trash mobs and magic damage caused some headaches for sure. This was post nerf so the final boss should have been easier, but he still kicked our butts several times before we figured out a workable strat.

But I thought the fights were fun, the flying mechanic novel and the lore was good too. And plus, there was a murloc. MOAR murlocs!

To do list

I keep saying that I will get back to playing my alts (including my very neglected 80 spriest) just as soon as I have finished the game on my main.  So the current things on the to do list that I am working on:

• Loremaster – I am trying to finish off outlands and stuck with some very annoying zones where am one or two quests short – then it is off to Eastern Kingdoms/Kalimdor for the rest of the grind
• Exalted Oracles – I went with the puppy men first and have just started opening eggs with Oracles – mainly I am after the mount, but also wanting the Mercenary achievement from hitting exalted (then back to the Wolvar because oracles are creepy)
• Exalted Argent Crusade – cause I am farming champion’s seals for the mounts – I got bored for a while so I still have only bought the “cheap” argent tournament mounts, but there are plenty still to get
• PVP – my PVP set is stuck at mostly level 78 crafted items, so need to farm some honor to get some more
• PVP mounts – have never gotten any of these so I have something concrete to aim for by way of marks while farming for new gear – does require that I amass a grand total of 150 WSG marks (currently on 30) – first up Stormpike battle charger
• Exalted Argent Dawn – as part of the Loremaster I have been doing quests in EPL and WPL and am getting quite fond of those Dawnies stuck forever in that barren wilderness
• My mount count is 70/100 – a quick reckoning of those I am still working towards leaves me a way short unless I manage to farm several rare drops.  But I remain confident that Blizz will work on adding more mounts for me by the time I get there.

Phew, that is a lot to be occupied with on a very small amount of game time every week.

Some shamans is for arenas

Okay, so I got myself into a couple of arenas with some likely noobs who have little more experience than I do.  Currently sporting a ranking of about 95 in 2v2s and still on the big zero in 3s.  I rock.

We have put together our teams without any regard for complimentary class combinations or any such rubbish and it is a whole heap of fun.  I keep finding new spells that I have never used before and realising that they might actually have a worthwhile function in PVP – it took me several matches to remember that I have Hex.

My first couple of matches were the most fun as a team mate and I wondered if people would get frustrated with a resto shaman/resto druid combo.  Turns out was not so fun – we each did a bunch of healing but the flaw in our plan was that there was nobody to actually kill the other side.  Bit of a miscalculation.

It seems that the universal tactic whether I am playing resto or elemental is “focus fire the shaman” and our best endeavours were where I managed to survive long enough to let my team mates kill someone else.  I have figured out a tactical response though – I invited another shaman to join my team – so we are going to go ele/resto for a couple of games and I will hang him out as the target dummy.

WTB more character slots

So now that I have finally got almost all of my alts above level 20 (except for rogues, some shamans isn’t for rogues), I have to decide who I have to delete to make a spot for my new worgen.  Although, what if worgen can only be rogues?  I would be screwed!!